In our current project we've been averaging about 7 minutes for our daily scrum standup.
We kicked of this project Mid April, and are currently in our 2nd sprint. So far the length of the standup has remained consistent, and this speaks volume on how the department, the team, the individuals have "gotten" what the standup is all about.
Standup meetings for our previous project took a long time, several times it went over 30 minutes and up to 45 minutes, for reasons I can chalk off to:
- The size of the team: We'd have at times upwards of 20+ attending the standup.
- The team members interpretation of the purpose and value of the daily standup.
- The overall lack of experience with agile practices and internal process immaturity.
I was often a violator of the "rules" that govern the dynamics of the standup. Keep it short and to the point turned into discussions on implementation approach, use of technology and discovery and issue resolution on the spot. Big no-nos.
Still, out of these sweet and short 7 minute standup, I know I am the big mouth. Those of you that work with me or have in the past, know that I can talk anyone's head off when I get into it, so I am diligently working on keeping my status short, relevant and meaningful to the other participants, which means very little tech talk, acronyms or developer specific content. Remembering the standup is about the project team progress update and not about the development team update is something I need to remind myself daily.
I want to summarize my lessons learned into the simple bullet point advise as I'd like to share it:
- Keep teams small. This should be guided by the projects needs, common sense and some "best practices". I'd say an "ideal" team size would be between 2 and 4 developers a QA resource, one or two BA, one or two sponsors/product owners and the PM... a total of 6 to 10 total team members sounds about right. We currently have 8 out of the 9 team members participate consistently in the standup.
- Remind everyone about the 3 points each member should be talking about:
- What did you do/accomplish yesterday
- What will you be doing today
- Do you have any impediments that the PM or the Lead need to be aware of so that they can do their best to remove it for you.
- Be patient: Give yourself and your team the time you need to work out your own kinks. Don't give up on the standup. Find your own pace, your own style and your own way of doing it but by all means keep the spirit of the practice in mind at all times. It is about communication in its best and most effective form, the face to face.
I like the goal and benefit stated in this definition of a standup according to the Extreme Programming (XP) site:
The daily stand up meeting is not another meeting to waste people's time. It will replace many other meetings giving a net savings several times its own length
A good read to get the gist of what the standup should be is this article by Martin Fowler.
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